Tomorrow Never Knows and Yesterday Isn't Much Brighter

There was a pretty good story to be mined from the premise of the 2019 movie Yesterday but unfortunately, screenwriter Richard Curtis didn't feel like digging it up. Instead he used the intriguing premise of his movie -- suppose a person found himself or herself in a world where the Beatles never existed -- as the basis of a rather lame romcom that used almost every cinematic cliché in the book.

It says something about the subtlety of the movie that by the time Kate McKinnon's character showed up to offer the protagonist a life of worldly success, it seemed a wonder that she did not appear and depart in a cloud of sulfur. Indeed, it seemed like the only subtle touch in the movie was how it downplayed the fact that the Anglo-Indian protagonist was in love with a white English woman -- a fact that once would have been considered very controversial but now seemed worthy of little more than a shrug.

Curtis does deserve credit for inserting a scene into the movie that so smacks of chutzpah that one marvels that he had the gall to write it. Then again, I'm not sure "credit" is really the right word I should be using in regard to a scene like that.

Pop Song of the Week: "Dear Prudence"

My favorite Beatles cover. Gracias a Dios that Richard Curtis didn't make me forget it.

Trailer of the Week: Yesterday

Heh. I got burnt out on Beatles music a long time ago yet I still found the idea for this movie to be intriguing. And that's before I found out that it was directed by Danny Boyle and written by Richard Curtis. If nothing else, it certainly gives an interesting perspective to the ongoing controversy over cultural appropriation.

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Doctor Who (The Second Series): “Vincent and the Doctor”

This was obviously one of the most ambitious episodes of this season and the first one written for the series by former Blackadder writer Richard Curtis.

You don't have to know a whole lot about Vincent van Gogh or art to appreciate this episode. But it helps. Even if you did not know anything about van Gogh apart from the old story about him cutting off his ear, I suspect you would still get a lot out of it. After all, you don't have to know a lot about art to know what it's like to be depressed. Or to feel unappreciated. And it is a credit to Curtis that he manages to make van Gogh's feelings in that area more believable than one would expect to find in a science fiction show.

Of course, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if the Doctor has not found something wrong in a van Gogh painting like he did at the beginning of this episode but if instead he had found something wrong in an Escher print. Or a Hopper painting. Or a Picasso portrait. Or...You get the idea.